Yeah 3G isn't that great. Hopefully 4G spreads quickly. Although I've heard the advertised speeds are no where near reality.

If it is as fast as advertised I would drop my expensive broadband and just use my EVO as a hot spot on 4G!

Wed Mar 30, 2011 7:23 pm

mancabbage

Joined: 29 Jun 2005
Posts: 9285
Location: london

Woland wrote: You can use Spotify on mobile devices in some parts of Europe. People use that for listening to music here, it costs 9,99 €/month for mobile (4,99 € if you don't want the mobile thingy), or you can use it for free with ads.

It pretty much means you can stream all the music you want from a huuuuge library (~ 10 million tracks and growing all the time) on your phone and it's relatively cheap. You can also share playlists and whatnot very easily.

This seems to be where it's at in this part of the world.

i love spotify, they had the last atmosphere double ep on it before it was even out to buy on amazon, need a fast phone though otherwise its useless, but def where its at... the sharing music malarky via facebook is pretty nifty too

Wed Mar 30, 2011 7:36 pm

bakemosphere

Joined: 05 Apr 2005
Posts: 701
Location: 304

tbh until battery life capacity increases and phones run more efficiently I'd much rather keep a separate device to play music from, my phone dies prematurely 2-4 times a week as is. I'm definitely investing in a higher capacity battery in my next upgrade, but with iPods being so small now it's not like carrying another device is really a big deal.

Thu Mar 31, 2011 1:58 am

AdamBomb

Joined: 05 Mar 2004
Posts: 3183
Location: Louisiana

redball wrote: Cheap products is where old technology goes to die. The point isn't that in 2 years no corded digital music players will exist. It's that in a short time the higher end stuff will all sync via the cloud and the middle tier stuff will follow that.

As for the PC dying... It will certainly live on to some extent. I think corporations will start moving back to a thin-client style of machine where the box on your desk will be similar to the Apple TV in size and it'll hold enough crap locally to survive a short term network outage but that's about it. At home there will be more single unit devices like the iMac and other forms of desktop computers will become less and less frequent, rapidly being replaced by phones and laptops. The current laptop set will likely use tablets and phones and heavy keyboard interaction will be facilitated with setups like this:

If you have a laptop now and you dock it to get bigger screens and better keyboard then imagine the same setup, only you've dropped your phone into a cradle instead. There will be that too.

That picture looks symbolic of the phone dominating the laptop.

Thu Mar 31, 2011 8:54 am

squirtisblow

Joined: 12 Mar 2003
Posts: 1594
Location: SFV

sometimes you just gotta bend a laptop over and show it who's making the calls.

Thu Mar 31, 2011 9:51 am

Captiv8

Joined: 25 Aug 2006
Posts: 8546
Location: Third Coast

Both Will Smith and Denzel Washington have shown us that MP3 players are integral parts of the apocalypse.

Thu Mar 31, 2011 10:11 am

NeuroA champion of Kurtis SP

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 7909

Captiv8 wrote: Both Will Smith and Denzel Washington have shown us that MP3 players are integral parts of the apocalypse.

also BeatsByDre headphones

Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:39 pm

_illness

Joined: 14 Mar 2009
Posts: 160

a few things:

With regards to Amazon Cloud Player, I did not see anyone mention the fact that all Amazon mp3 purchase from now on will not go against your allotted cloud space. I buy almost all of my music through amazon so this works pretty well for me.

Now, with regards to cloud computing in general, I think that anyone who believes the future holds ipods with terabytes of harddrive space is being short sighted. The future of computing will hinge much more on software, user interface, and cloud storage than it will on hardware.

I hope for a future where our devices are simply a portal to information and entertainment we want and not the custodian of all these things. Joshua Topolsky, Editor-in-chief of engadget.com, wrote a very compelling article on this sort of thing last year. He called it Continuous Client.

As mentioned many times already two of the biggest hurdles will be battery life and network speeds, and again these things are being improved everyday, but we are still a ways out. Verizon’s new LTE network seems like it will be pretty revolutionary- there latest device, the Thunderbolt, averages around 14mbps. AT&T and T-Mobile’s 4g networks are in name only and have a lot of catching up to do (hence the proposed merger). Battery life, on the other hand, will need to be vastly improved on our mobile devices in order for processor speeds to continue to accelerate. Redball pointed out that newer processors are less taxing on the battery however it is pretty obvious that battery technology and innovation has been a bit stagnant compared to that of processors.

Last edited by _illness on Thu Mar 31, 2011 4:11 pm; edited 1 time in total

Thu Mar 31, 2011 1:12 pm

T-Wrexp00ny tang

Joined: 30 Jun 2002
Posts: 6416
Location: Detroit, Michigan

Batteries Charge Quickly and Retain Capacity, Thanks to New Structure

ScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2011) — The batteries in Illinois professor Paul Braun's lab look like any others, but they pack a surprise inside.

Braun's group developed a three-dimensional nanostructure for battery cathodes that allows for dramatically faster charging and discharging without sacrificing energy storage capacity. The researchers' findings will be published in the March 20 advance online edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Aside from quick-charge consumer electronics, batteries that can store a lot of energy, release it fast and recharge quickly are desirable for electric vehicles, medical devices, lasers and military applications.

"This system that we have gives you capacitor-like power with battery-like energy," said Braun, a professor of materials science and engineering. "Most capacitors store very little energy. They can release it very fast, but they can't hold much. Most batteries store a reasonably large amount of energy, but they can't provide or receive energy rapidly. This does both."

The performance of typical lithium-ion (Li-ion) or nickel metal hydride (NiMH) rechargeable batteries degrades significantly when they are rapidly charged or discharged. Making the active material in the battery a thin film allows for very fast charging and discharging, but reduces the capacity to nearly zero because the active material lacks volume to store energy.

Braun's group wraps a thin film into three-dimensional structure, achieving both high active volume (high capacity) and large current. They have demonstrated battery electrodes that can charge or discharge in a few seconds, 10 to 100 times faster than equivalent bulk electrodes, yet can perform normally in existing devices.

This kind of performance could lead to phones that charge in seconds or laptops that charge in minutes, as well as high-power lasers and defibrillators that don't need time to power up before or between pulses.

Braun is particularly optimistic for the batteries' potential in electric vehicles. Battery life and recharging time are major limitations of electric vehicles. Long-distance road trips can be their own form of start-and-stop driving if the battery only lasts for 100 miles and then requires an hour to recharge.

"If you had the ability to charge rapidly, instead of taking hours to charge the vehicle you could potentially have vehicles that would charge in similar times as needed to refuel a car with gasoline," Braun said. "If you had five-minute charge capability, you would think of this the same way you do an internal combustion engine. You would just pull up to a charging station and fill up."

All of the processes the group used are also used at large scales in industry so the technique could be scaled up for manufacturing.

They key to the group's novel 3-D structure is self-assembly. They begin by coating a surface with tiny spheres, packing them tightly together to form a lattice. Trying to create such a uniform lattice by other means is time-consuming and impractical, but the inexpensive spheres settle into place automatically.

Then the researchers fill the space between and around the spheres with metal. The spheres are melted or dissolved, leaving a porous 3-D metal scaffolding, like a sponge. Next, a process called electropolishing uniformly etches away the surface of the scaffold to enlarge the pores and make an open framework. Finally, the researchers coat the frame with a thin film of the active material.

The result is a bicontinuous electrode structure with small interconnects, so the lithium ions can move rapidly; a thin-film active material, so the diffusion kinetics are rapid; and a metal framework with good electrical conductivity.

The group demonstrated both NiMH and Li-ion batteries, but the structure is general, so any battery material that can be deposited on the metal frame could be used.

"We like that it's very universal, so if someone comes up with a better battery chemistry, this concept applies," said Braun, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois. "This is not linked to one very specific kind of battery, but rather it's a new paradigm in thinking about a battery in three dimensions for enhancing properties."

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the Department of Energy supported this work. Visiting scholar Huigang Zhang and former graduate student Xindi Yu were co-authors of the paper.

Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:41 pm

_illness

Joined: 14 Mar 2009
Posts: 160

Thank you for that. Lets hope we can see this tech in action. Soon.

Thu Mar 31, 2011 4:09 pm

adic

Joined: 07 May 2009
Posts: 727
Location: SJC

That article about the batteries sounds like it could be a huge breakthrough...

Battery technology is the main hold up in a lot of technology moving forward, particularly electric cars

Thu Mar 31, 2011 4:37 pm

redball

Joined: 12 May 2006
Posts: 6878
Location: Northern New Jersey

Here's a nearer future article on the current and next gen mobile phone processors.

As awesome as those sound I wouldn't hold my breathe waiting for those batteries to come out anytime soon, it doesn't make sense for battery companies to increase their capacity, it undermines their bottom line - making money.

Thu Mar 31, 2011 8:09 pm

jakethesnakeguy who cried about wrestling being real

Joined: 03 Feb 2006
Posts: 6311
Location: airstrip one

I don't think that's necessarily 100% true. These are phone companies, not battery companies. They have a vested interest in making their product not only good quality, but better quality than competitors. Having long battery life is a huge selling point for smart phones. I think they are chomping at the bit to get better technology as fast as they can.